


With.

by minxiebutt



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Child Death, F/M, Likely to remain incomplete, Mentions of Witchcraft, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, dabbling in the dark arts, resurrecting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2017-04-11
Packaged: 2018-08-15 16:00:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8062813
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minxiebutt/pseuds/minxiebutt
Summary: Nanaba's best friend Mike died when she was ten years old, forcing her to navigate the labyrinth of grief left in his absence. But, what if he never left her side? Rated T for themes and imagery.





	1. Chapter 1

 

i.

Her parents worry when she starts displaying interest in witchcraft. Ever since the _day at the lake_ , the paranormal has swallowed her up in its grasp like a child cups their hands to cage a newfound insect or other little spectacular. It is easier that way for Nanaba, after what she saw, to cling to the spiritual link that now tugs on her psyche and draws her attentions from the present to the next dimension after death.

She was ten years old that _day at the lake_ , and ten is a good age for awareness. Old enough for memories to solidify undeniably, but young enough for your parents to ship you off to a pediatric psychiatrist twice a week because _no, honey, please stop feeding the stray cats in the neighbourhood, there’s no such thing as familiars._

She feeds the strays anyway, sneaking little strips of meat from her plate and into her hand, going outside after she’s excused from the table to deposit the meager meal in its usual spot. The animals learn the routine, they adore her, and she them. Unlike the adults in her life, animals listen, withhold their judgements and opinions, look her in the eye.

At the same time, her parents are concerned at her new introversion, wide smiles and adventures with her best friend replaced now by somber one-sided conversations. She shuns the company of the other kids at school, they learn at a parent-teacher conference-- foregoes the cafeteria, sits in the quietest corner of the school library and turns pages of books over and over, quietly voicing the words as if reading for the benefit of another person.

ii.

Two years later, she refuses to participate in sports anymore, and her therapist urges on another hobby. _Let us see the world how you see it_. A twelve year old shouldn’t have a camera so expensive, but Nanaba’s seriousness has aged her, made her less showy and floaty than her peers-- or at least, that’s what her parents think. She cleans the camera religiously, carries it safely, doesn't show it off or brag about it, and captures everything she can.

The family computer fills up with photographs, evidence of Nanaba’s morbid preoccupation. She's taken a liking to the dead things she sees here and there: dried and crinkled worms after the rain passes; a squirrel one morning in the middle of the road with fresh blood, the carcass that same afternoon with its eyes picked out and covered in flies; the tail end a baby rabbit; the lone shoe of a child, dropped and forgotten on the sidewalk. The world around her is more dead than she ever knew, and she looks for that now, nihilistic like a soul who's lost everything that ever mattered.

“Nanaba, sunshine,” her mother calls one night, clicking through the pictures from that day’s stroll in the park in wet spring, stopped on the photo set of a nest, three drowned baby birds. “Why did you take pictures of this? There were so many pretty trees flowering today instead.”

“Everyone was watching the trees because they're _alive_ , Mom,” she says. And her mother shifts warily.

iii.

By the time she is fourteen, the shadow person lingering on her peripherals is her constant companion, always moving just from view when she looks for them, but obliging her with an appearance in a photograph every now and then. They're proved by the darker-than-natural shadows in the pictures.

It was frightening at first, but now it does away with the things that scare her. Walking alone isn’t really alone now, with a darkness stirring in the corner of her eye, following closely, protectively. Do the other adolescents see it too, with the way they part like the sea as she comes walking? Despite being a loner freshmen, she gets by without any bullying incidents directed at her, though she does witness them often. Just like everything else, she photographs it, captures that power play, to let it live on forever even after the kids in it are dead. It used to scare the aggressors. They thought she would turn them in, but it is soon clear that Nanaba is not a threat, and a mutual understanding develops, symbiotic, each party taking what they need, be it fear or photos of that fear.

The Wiccans invite her to sit with them in art class-- at her inquiry they tell her where she can get a better understanding. She gets a book from the library that afternoon, her parents find it the next day, and her library card disappears ‘mysteriously.’ Everyday, she sits with them anyway, learning from snippets of conversation around the teacher’s lecture. Thankfully, high school gives her the chance to be covered up in stereotypes, from her associations to her heavy black eyeliner and dyed dark hair. Her preoccupation with the afterlife just labelled a passing phase, and she misses more and more appointments with her psychiatrist. She doesn’t need to talk about her feelings anymore-- four years hasn’t changed anything that will ever change again.

It’s a long walk through the suburbs then over a walkway above the highway to get to school, and she makes a habit to carry peanuts in a plastic bag in her backpack, lies to her parents that it’s a snack for the days she stays late with tutoring. She feeds the crows that hang out in the big oak by the main road. They’re the messengers between the living and the dead, and keeping the line of communication open is in her interests.

“Tell him I’m alright,” she asks of the crows once they like her enough to land on her arm and eat from her palm. She's had a way with wildlife since losing him, and she can't help but wonder if he's told them about her considering how quickly she fell into their good graces. After that, the shadow person stops moving away when she looks at them. They linger, they evaporate, her finer hairs stand on end. Little things get knocked over when she’s looking, and nothing ever breaks.

iv.

It’s not always so morbid. College comes a year early through her accelerated study, and with it, the goth fades out, she’s blonde again, better at hiding her fascinations. Wears too much floral and pastel. Her flatmates make note of her bird feeders and plates of midnight meat scraps for the feral cats with a sort of aloof curiosity, calling it quirky, but that’s all.

Out from under the scrutinising, watchful eyes of her parents, Nanaba learns what it means to be still. When her room is supernaturally silent, the air stops moving, it chills. _Shh_ , quiet, unmoving, she can feel the thinning of the veil, can feel herself being sucked down into it while a cold feather traces over the back of her neck, a slice across the nape to sever her spinal cord. Going into death identical to him.

She’s turning nineteen on the night she draws her first pentagram, cherished newspaper articles at each point on the star, a long-unworn child’s wristwatch at the center, the only thing she was allowed to keep. Other than a bad case of gooseflesh, it’s a failure. Amazon has books about it with free shipping on prime, so she buys as many as she can, learns the proper way, and tries again as often as she can, even without any results.

Meanwhile the stillness intensifies, spills into her daily routine, with cold impressions of hands the size of catcher’s mitts, cupping, grasping, stroking like a blind man learning her body. One night in the summer heat, on the anniversary of the _day at the lake_ , lying naked on her bed with a drained wine bottle, the shadows morph. Pool down and collect in the corner that was just previously occupied by moonlight, slink over to her, cover her like a blanket. It's the wine, maybe, her inhibitions lowered.

Nanaba opens her hand, feels the chill lace through her fingers. “Hello there, my friend. You're patient, aren't you.”

The chill pushes the hair from her face then makes a dent in the blankets parallel to her, like another person lying down for pillow talk. She's drunk and incapable of savouring the dead silence.

v.

The things that comfort her begin to frighten her flatmates as finals week madly approaches. The toppling of trinkets, once excusably a chance event, become erratic. An entire bookshelf is cleared like someone swept it all onto the floor with their arm. A poster, secure in the living room with a nail in each corner, inexplicably ripped down the middle. Dishes slip from hands too often, with the general consensus that it feels snatched rather than dropped. Any unsettling sensation that Nanaba calls comforting, they call it creepy, they call it haunted, and they move out. She should have known this was coming.

“Are you happy now?” she asks, pulling the back of her hand across her cheeks. She can’t afford this place on her own and as soon as the semester is over and she's withdrawn from the next fall’s classes, she’s got to move back home to her parents who treat her like a pariah. “I hope it’s worth it.”

vi.

She doesn’t know who she’s invited into her life, though she had her own private hopes all these years, she finally gets her confirmation on her first night back in her old room in her hometown.

A piece of paper, a pen poised in her non-dominant hand over the sheet. She's right-handed, no semblance of skill in her left hand. Quietly, she instructs her shadow companion, looming over her shoulder like a nosy child, to use her left hand to write it's answers.

“Has it always been you?”

Her hand twitches, forced by something she can't see, so she closes her eyes until it's over. _Yes_.

“What's your name?”

The answer makes her scream.

vii.

She’d been down to _the lake_ , figured eleven years was enough time to relieve her of panic; she was right. It felt a little empty being there, as if even the dead did not like to congregate on its shores. Maybe to many crossed over here. She showers afterward, and as she tips her head back to rinse her hair, those catcher’s mitt hands on her hips force her eyes open.

Seeing her shadow companion in the corner of her eye is one thing. Face to face like this, black mass like a gaping hole into another dimension, it takes the life right out of her in fright. It can’t be long that she’s fainted for. Steam still fills the bathroom, though the water has been turned off. A towel has been tossed over her, imperfectly. Written in the steam of the mirror, S O R R Y.

“It's okay,” she says, closing her eyes.

She doesn't jump when the shadow pulls itself from nothingness and invites itself into her bed twenty minutes later, though she adopts a hummingbird heartbeat with the breathing to match. But as soon as those cold feathers begin to work their way over her body, she relaxes.

“Mike?” She asks, hears in response a shushing noise, low in her ear.

What comes into being at the foot of her bed is like the boy she knew over half her life ago, only older, aged to match Nanaba. He's not glimmering or grayscale like a movie as he sits there, but the perfect appearance of flesh and blood. Even his cheeks have colour.

“Shh,” he soothes but she sits up. Nanaba swears he rolls his eyes somewhere under those bangs.

“Mike.” Nanaba wants to touch him, but she doesn't. Can't. Can hardly breathe. He looks so handsome all grown up like this, grown into his ears but not quite his nose. To be fair, there was never any hope of that nose looking any less dominant on his face, and the thick moustache enhances it all, and she doesn't care because she's missed him so, so much.

“I'm really here, Nana,” he jokes, smirking. “Unless you want to think you've died or gone mad.”

“I don't care how, because you're here.” She can't hold back anymore, reaches her hand out--

Meets solidness, warmth.

“Surprise.” Mike stands amidst her slack-jawed staring and leans over her. “I've got something to tell you, about all this.”

  
  
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

“Surprise.” Mike stands amidst her slack-jaw staring and leans over her. “I've got something to tell you, about all this.”

 

_ One hot summer day when Nanaba had just turned ten and Mike was nearing eleven, he watched himself die. A runaway watercraft rushing ashore straight through the swimmer’s cove at the same time that Mike and Nanaba were submerged in a game of underwater chicken. It was clean-- he was yanked from his body and, from above himself, watched the blade sever his spinal column in one single sweep. Nanaba, wearing her goggles, didn't look away. _

 

“So, you're not a hallucination?” Nanaba asks after he finishes explaining how he came back to a tangible body. 

 

He passes his hand through her shoulder, taking in the warmth, knowing that he’s draining the heat of her blood by the way she curls back. Then, he settles his hand there instead, grasping the boniness. “No. I’m your familiar.”

 

“I didn’t enter an agreement with you.”

 

“You don’t need to.” He’s prepaid with his blood and surrendered his eternity so that he can accompany her to death. “I’m yours.”

 

;;;

 

Mike eases himself back into her life at first. He stays in the corners and shadows during the day, and he comes out at night, when the house is quiet and Nanaba is sleepy. Sometimes, as himself. Other times, in the form of one of the animals that she feeds. For years, he’s disguised himself in the stray cats and crows and ravens, but now that he can present himself to her as the man that he’s become, he finds that he’s reluctant to. 

 

She touches. A lot. And it's not that he wants to shy away from her, no, it's that he’s ashamed with the way it makes his soul roll like the waves of a maelstrom. When he's wearing a guise, it's easier to subdue the churning feeling, to deny it and carry on. But when he's himself and she's touching him and holding him like when they were children, he finds it almost unbearable the way he wants to touch her back. 

 

She drinks like a fish out of water, and that brings him back to focus. When she's defenceless like this, when she needs him, then he can put his wayward desires aside and strictly guardian over her. Luckily, it's not that she goes out and gets drunk. She squirrels away in her room-- the same room they had countless sleepovers together in, still painted that same cheerful blue with sponged clouds-- with bottles in her bag that she sneaks in and drains all too hastily. Her parents, despite her age, are holding steadfast to having their home dry, but Nanaba is nothing if not stubborn in her resolve. She drinks hard and fast and skips dinner to hide her intoxication, and that's where Mike comes in.

 

He absolutely should not be assuming her form and prancing through the house to procure a meal, but he does it because he is hers and he will take care of her. It's guilt, too, giving him cause. Mike can tell by the way she looks at him that the memory she learned to live with is pushing into the forefront of her mind and pushing her into heavier drinking. 

 

Some nights, when she's soggy with alcohol and crumpling in on herself, he takes hold of her skin and slips inside of it, grabbing her soul itself and cradling it, as if he can make up for the missed time. They were both so young when he died, and bearing that witness has left her warped, her spirit leaning closer to the boundary of life and death than most. But it's been that proximity to the mistress death that has allowed him to remain close to her. 

 

“Miiiike,” she whines quietly one night. He's a cat on the perch of her windowsill, watching a large amount of whiskey disappear between the lips he finds himself imagining licking. “Mike, come here.”

 

It's sunrise soon. He can see it in the glow on the horizon, but she's unemployed, working hours mean nothing.

 

He goes to where she's stretched out supine on the floor as smoke and immediately, she's gripping at the vapours. 

 

“Miiike,” she pouts and it takes him by no small amount of surprise to see her this way. In an instant, he's a solid slab of man beside her, fully dressed to create layers to separate himself from the whole of her skin on display. She's rolled sideways and her breast is barely contained in her bra now. 

 

“Mike, hold me,” she whispers, tugging the bedspread down and over both of them. 

 

“Shhh. Someone will hear.”

 

“They'll think it's another nightmare,” she dismisses and he winces. He knows it's true. “Mike, hold me.”

 

“I am, I am.” He circles her in his arms. “Better?”

 

She rubs her face against his chest and sighs out the tension in her body. “Yeah, I just wish I could fuck you.”

 

“You're drunk. Go to sleep.”

 

After a few minutes, she passes out, but her words keep running laps around his head. 

 

**Author's Note:**

> just self indulging over here, don't mind me.


End file.
